Thursday 27 September 2012

Preliminary Work

As a preliminary task, we created a magazine front cover and contents page. We will use these to prepare for our final practical project, in which we will create a music magazine, and to look back on to see how we have developed.

Front Cover


For my magazine, I had to create a house style that would be present throughout. Straight away, I settled on a basic theme of blue and yellow, which is present in the school logo. I have one or two fonts, both of which are recurring. The images that are used are both ones took myself on the cameras that were available. The style and tags help convey the message of success and participation in school; the colours are reminiscent of the school's logo, the tags talk about GCSE Results and work. The proportions of the magazine aren't that good; some of the text doesn't look nice and seems too stretched. The content, images and style, however, all convey the genre of a school magazine. I think the front cover is alright as far as prelimary tasks go, but I have a number of points that I wish to improve on by the time it gets to my music magazine:
- Higher Quality of taken images
- Better looking background (The gradient used is very bland)
- More interesting layout. 
- Some key areas of improvement for the layout:
  • Don't make it cluttered
  • Improve proportions for text
  • Better placement of images
  • More variety in vocabulary (Words got too repetitive)
  • Waste less space
I had enough content to make a decent front cover, but the execution could do with some improving as it looks amateur. I like some parts of it and hope to develop some of the better points as well improving in the areas that are lacking.

Contents Page

 I tried to maintain the consistent house style when it came to my contents as well. As with the front cover, all of the images are my own; I like the pictures and think they're an ideal quality. I made sure to include a section which referenced social media so I could engage the target audience, whose lives revolve around the internet. However, in the future, I need to have a clearer layout, which isn't as cluttered, in order to create a nicer looking magazine. Also, I think the darker blue is too dull for the type of magazine I want. 
       There are areas for improvement and by the time it comes to the Music Magazine I hope to have developed my skills enough to create an authentic looking magazine with a clear layout, a nice style and good quality images that convey the genre of the product.